Digital assets include digital files of all types such as photo, video, audio, text, and rich text. In addition, digital assets can include composite aggregations of other digital assets such as html pages and their image attachments. Digital assets can exist in many forms and can reside on many different types of asset storage media.
Digital asset storage media can include local and remote storage devices and services. Some digital asset storage media are read-only storage media such as CD-ROM optical disks. Other digital asset storage media are read-write storage media such as removable and fixed hard drives, floppy disks, flash drives and other solid state storage devices, and read-write optical disks. Other types of devices such as digital cameras, video cameras, electronic picture frames, mobile phone and digital audio storage devices can also serve as digital asset storage media. Other forms of digital asset storage media would include remotely accessible storage media such as network connected servers, network accessible storage devices (NAS), internet locations with remotely accessible calling interfaces, and so-called “cloud” storage areas, such as services provided by Amazon and Google.
Owners of digital assets may wish to enumerate and track where their digital assets are located so they can access, update and manage them. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,722, Ketterer et al. describe a method of cataloging digital assets stored on removable media on a computer which includes the optional step of storing a unique media ID on the removable media. In U.S. Pat. No. 6,370,545, Shaath teaches a method of accessing digital assets stored on removable storage media which includes creating a unique identifier for the storage media. Both of these methods address the need for tracking digital assets available on a single computer, and do not address the case where digital assets are stored and accessed on a variety of nodes in a distributed network.
Problems often arise when a user's digital assets reside on a digital asset storage media that apparently moves around on a distributed network. For example, a CD containing digital photographs can be accessed from one computer on a distributed network, and then the CD can be removed from the first computer and accessed from a second computer on the distributed network. Tracking the storage location of digital assets when their apparent location has changed is difficult. Without the capability to track the digital assets, software that attempts to track them will see the first set of digital assets appear to “go away” and a new set of digital assets appear in some other location, when in fact they are actually the same set of digital assets.
When this happens, the digital asset tracking software generally assumes that the first set of digital assets is either offline (unreachable) or has been deleted, and that the second instance is a new set of digital assets. Even if it was able to determine that the second instance of the digital assets had the same content as the first, it still would not be able to distinguish whether these were the same digital assets or copies of them.
The problem commonly occurs when the digital assets exist on removable digital asset storage media such as a CD, DVD or thumb drive. In this case, the digital asset storage media can be removed from one computer and then attached to a different computer.
The problem can also occur on the internet when a service is accessed via a different network address, or when the same digital assets are accessed from one service through to another. In addition, the problem can arise if different networking types are involved, which can occur if a service or network attached storage device supports multiple network connections or protocols. For example, it is difficult to recognize that the same digital asset storage medium that was previously accessed by UPnP is now accessible over a USB cable or via HTTP.
In order to access any digital asset storage medium, a set of hardware, software and security protocols are necessary. Together, they comprise the method for accessing stored assets. When a digital asset storage medium is moved or its connection or communication protocol changes, it affects its method for accessing stored assets.
The key is that the user doesn't want to worry about the method for accessing stored assets when tracking their digital assets. Existing solutions are generally incapable of successfully tracking digital assets because the method for accessing the stored digital assets is tied to a representation of the digital asset, so moving or changing the way a digital asset storage medium is connected to the network confuses the software that attempts to track the digital assets.
Certain types of storage media, such as the USB drives that have been popular in recent years, include an identifier (e.g., a serial number) that can be used to uniquely identify the storage medium. However, even if a particular system may use the unique identifier to recognize that the storage medium has been accessed before on that system, there is no provision for tracking digital assets on a distributed network. An additional problem exists the USB drive is not always accessible using applications that do not have administrative privileges
Bit9, Inc. of Waltham, Mass. has disclosed a software application known as Bit9 Parity that enables a company to control access to removable media such as USB drives for data security reasons. This application enables the definition of a list of authorized removable media devices, as well as allowable access modes for those devices. While this approach addresses the problem of controlling access to a predefined set of assets, it does not provide any mechanism for tracking a user's assets in a distributed system of interconnected network nodes, where it will not be possible to predefine a set of asset storage media.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,451,224 describes a table-driven application for updating device identifiers and communicating a message with the updated identifiers to other nodes in a distributed network.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,149 discloses a method for locating resources in a peer-to-peer network. The method relies on cooperative network nodes registering themselves with a resource naming server to provide access information such as an IP address.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2008/0178198 to Gauba discloses a distributed digital media management system for the discovery, management, access and control of digital media distributed over a plurality of devices. This approach does not preserve access to the digital media when the devices are no longer available, or are only intermittently available.
Accordingly, there remains a need to overcome the problem of tracking digital asset storage media, and the digital assets that they contain that is robust for the digital asset storage media going offline and returning online, sometimes in a different virtual location on the network from where they were last seen.